Replaying Sunday, November 4, 1990

News Drivers: A Tainted, Tenacious Union

Date: 05 November 1990

By Robert D. McFadden

Robert

It was born as a union of horse-and-buggy newspaper deliverymen at the turn of the century, a stepchild of the fledgling labor movement and New York's yellow journalism wars. Its story is not a sentimental tract on human rights, but an often unsavory tale of rough, insular workers struggling for their own interests. Along the way, the drivers' union -- now locked in a crucial, perhaps lethal, battle with The Daily News -- has mounted strikes and slowdowns and tolerated violence and intimidation to prod and sometimes cripple employers in its fight for wages, benefits and job security for members who bundle and truck most of the region's newspapers and magazines.

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Daily News Strike Becomes a Battle for Advertisers

Date: 04 November 1990

By John Kifner

John Kifner

The battle over the future of The Daily News shifted to its advertisers yesterday as the paper's management struggled to print and, more importantly, distribute its Sunday edition. Strikers demonstrated at the Alexander's department store in Rego Park, Queens, and handed out leaflets urging a boycott of another Alexander's branch, in Long Island City, Queens. Alexander's, one of the paper's largest advertisers, has said it will continue advertising in The News.

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News's Loyal Readers Are Split on Strike, Too

Date: 04 November 1990

By David Gonzalez

David Gonzalez

Mickey Heit walked out of his neighborhood candy store with a copy of The New York Post tucked under his arm, barely glancing at a stack of yesterday's Daily News that lay free for the taking on the corner. Although he is a regular News reader, he said that picking up a free copy had a higher hidden cost. "I feel bad; I don't want to cross the picket line," said Mr. Heit, 64 years old, who works at a car dealership and is a member of the United Auto Workers. "The News had good pictures and good reporters, but I can't see them hiring these outside people."

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Publisher Blames Union Rift in Strike

Date: 05 November 1990

By James Barron

James Barron

The publisher of The Daily News asserted yesterday that the 12-day-old strike at the paper was precipitated by a dispute within the drivers' union and efforts by an "out-of-power faction" to undermine the union leadership. "Behind the manipulation," said the publisher, James Hoge, "lies a year's worth of feuding" between the drivers' union president and a former union chief who is rumored to be considering a comeback. Mr. Hoge offered no evidence to support the claims, which he made in a letter to Mayor David N. Dinkins, and union leaders immediately dismissed his account.

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More of Less From Local TV Stations

Date: 05 November 1990

By Randall Rothenberg, Special To the New York Times

Randall Rothenberg

Texans seeking information about the elections Tuesday need look no farther than WFAA-Channel 8, the ABC affiliate here. The station has run uncompromising critiques of political advertising by a local professor, sent reporters as far as Mississippi to explore issues important to Texas and lured each candidate for governor to submit to a detailed, half-hour interrogation by a panel of reporters. But WFAA's commitment to covering the campaign may be the exception among American television stations. More typical is its competitor, KDFW-Channel 4, which recently promoted a "debate" between the candidates for governor that turned out to be an eight-minute impromptu encounter between them. Hampered by budget cutbacks and fighting for tight advertising dollars, many local television stations, the primary source of news for most Americans, are reducing their coverage of politics and policy, at a time when studies show that the major broadcast networks are also scaling back political reporting on their evening newscasts.

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Staying Alive

Date: 04 November 1990

By Anna Quindlen

Anna Quindlen

I love newspapers. I know that's like a butcher telling you steak is great, but the butcher is right and so am I. Every day, the people I work with produce fast history you can hold in your hand. Market research tells us that more and more people are relying on television news instead, but television news and newspapers aren't the same thing at all. Newspapers are portable and reusable. If you don't get the gist the first time, you can reread. If you don't care about one gist, you can turn to another. And when you're through with gist, you can pack up old dishes and line bird cages.

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Scab Labor in a Union Town

Date: 04 November 1990

By Irving Howe

Irving Howe

For some decades now, New York City has been a union town. What does that mean? Not that unions are to be regarded as a band of angels, nor that they are always good and wise. It means that unions are acknowledged as a legitimate part of the city's life, a partner in the social contract that more or less shapes our society. Behind the adherence to unions lies a simple premise: that the individual worker is helpless when confronting a rich and powerful corporation, and that only through collective action can workers express their needs and gain their ends. That is why "solidarity" has been a central term in the language of unionism -- and why strikebreaking has been seen as a violation of dcency.

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For the Soviet Press, Gorbachev as Target

Date: 04 November 1990

By Bill Keller

Bill Keller

TRADITIONALLY the only way for a Soviet leader to get bad press in his own country was to die. Then the puppet press, enlisted in the ritual of Kremlin forerunner-bashing, would discover that the late ruler had not been the benign genius portrayed during his lifetime in Pravda. Mikhail S. Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader who has lived to read his critics. The honeymoon between Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet press has soured gradually. By the middle of 1989, entering the fifth year of glasnost, the more daring publications felt free to publish articles scrutinizing him and his policies, and worrying that he was losing his stomach for the battle with hard-liners. Until recently, though, the commentaries were restrained by a reluctance to undermine the champion of reform and by the fact that newspaper editors generally served at the pleasure of the Communist Party.

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As Election Day Nears, Poll Finds Nation's Voters in a Gloomy Mood

Date: 04 November 1990

By Michael Oreskes, Special To the New York Times

Michael Oreskes

As Election Day draws near, Americans are more pessimistic about the future than at any time in a decade, according to the latest poll by The New York Times and CBS News. The dour mood coincides with deepening pessimism about the economy and is also linked to a collapse of faith in the ability of government and politicians to make things better, the telephone survey of 1,445 adults found.

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Newspapers Watch What People Watch in the TV Campaign

Date: 04 November 1990

By Randall Rothenberg

Randall Rothenberg

INSPIRED by Theodore H. White's "Making of the President" books, newspaper journalists for a generation have covered political races from the inside out, traveling with the campaigns and reporting on their intrigues. This year, against mounting criticism that they had not kept pace with the modern campaign of sound bites, satellites and consultants, more than a score of major newspapers determined to watch televised political advertisements as vigorously as they did the road show. The last few months have seen dailies across America scrutinize the commercials, assessing their veracity in regular columns that political professionals have dubbed "truth boxes." But some are wondering whether the new newspaper truth squads, armed with zappers and videocassette recorders, are delivering any more insight than did their road-weary predecessors.

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